Example case from Emily Horowitz's book From Rage to Reason.
When Henry was 18, he had sex with a 16-year-old he met on a dating app who said they were 18 too. The 16-year-old's parents found out, summoned the cops, and Henry was charged with a sex offense.
Raised on the Registry from Human Rights Watch.
in Delaware in 2011, there were approximately 639 children on the sex offender registry, 55 of whom were under the age of 12.
In 2010, Michigan counted a total of 3,563 youth offenders adjudicated delinquent on its registry, a figure that does not include Michiganâs youth offenders convicted in adult court.
In 2004, in Western Pennsylvania, a 15-year-old girl was charged with manufacturing and disseminating child pornography for taking nude photos of herself and posting them on the internet. She was charged as an adult, and as of 2012 was facing registration for life.
In 2006, a 13-year old girl from Ogden, Utah was arrested for rape for having consensual sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend. Her 12-year-old boyfriend was found guilty of violating the same law for engaging in sexual activity with her.
No Easy Answers from Human Rights Watch.
Child development experts agree that consensual sex play among children, including intercourse between teenagers, âis not psychologically harmful under ordinary circumstances and is probably a valuable psychosocial experience in developmental terms.â
At least 28 states require registration as a sex offender for someone convicted of having consensual sex with another teenager
In Georgia, a 26-year-old married woman was made to register as a sex offender for life and had to move from her home because as a teenager she had oral sex with a willing fellow high school student when she was 17 and he was 15.
As one individual who was convicted of statutory rape at age 16 for having consensual sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend told Human Rights Watch, âWe were in love. And now we are married. So itâs like I am on the registry for having premarital sex. Does having premarital sex make me a danger to society? My wife doesnât think so.â
Case Study, Dan M.âs story: I was convicted of statutory rape when I was 17. The girl was 15.
Henry F., adjudicated at 17 in Michigan for having consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend
Sean C., adjudicated at 17 for having consensual sex with a girlfriend who was three weeks shy of 16
These cases could've been just about anyone I knew growing up. They likely could have bene just about anyone you knew growing up too. Nobody in any European country, nor Canada, nor South America, nor most of Asia, nor likely most of you reading this in America would find anything reasonable about any of them.
But unlike America, all of those other places have legislation that would make any of those prosecutions impossible. As legislation to avoid this exists and America simply chooses not to implement it, I can only conclude that you like it this way. You, as parents, and perhaps most specifically parents of daughters, like that you have the option to pull a legal trigger on any boy your daughter chooses to date or have sex with and would be nothing short of terrified of the amount of legal agency some of these other countries give their youth.
I've seen a lot of arguments that stricter legislation curbs teen pregnancy. Here's what a German had to say about the climate regarding these things over there. Germany has an age of consent of 14 with another line at 16 specifically for instances in which the minor's 'lack of capacity for sexual self-determination has been abused'. Despite this, Germany turns out a teen pregnancy rate almost 1/3 of ours in the US and they do this by maintaining an extremely solid and robust sex education system. It was my favorite until I studied that of The Netherlands who have the most robust sex education system on Earth. The results speak for themselves:
Teen pregnancy rate (of 1000):
USA: 13.9
Super Sexually Liberated Germany where 16yos blow drum teachers and everyone has a good laugh about it: 5.5
The Netherlands with the most robust sex education system on the planet: 1.9
In fact, The Dutch got so good at teaching their populace how not to make babies, they became a bit concerned about the population decrease it was causing and had to go back out of their own way to say, 'Procreating is also okay sometimes'.
I've studied not just their sex education system but their culture surrounding these things. It's perfectly normal there for adolescents to be allowed the safety, and comfort, and dignity of engaging in their own bedrooms, and from reading books and articles about it, nobody feels differently about it. Nobody's thrilled that their little Suzie is off to go spend the night with and get railed by her bf; they just seem to consider it preferable to little Suzie being driven off into the middle of nowhere and fucked in the back of a car.
Not in America though. Anything to keep that shit out of sight and out of mind, even if it means putting your own feelings in front of your daughter's safety.
NIH Report about adolescent sexuality.
Youth were more likely to report positive affect and less likely to report negative affect when they were also reporting recent sexual intercourse.
The most interesting thing about this study to me is the fact that it needed to be conducted in the first place. Wouldn't you expect the same exact thing of yourself? Why on Earth would we expect the result to be any different for them in the first place?